PortfolioHub

Show the world and your network what you love to do by posting your personal projects and progress over time.

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Inspiration

The pandemic caused a lot of opportunities to vanish into thin air, especially for those whose professions required hands-on work that needed to be done onsite. This was especially impactful for the student community who needed those opportunities to build up their skills and avoid a gap in their resume. Biomed students lost research opportunities and engineering students couldn't access their beloved makerspaces. Computer science students, on the other hand, were able to mostly continue to program from their homes, simply due to the nature of the field. Hackathons and research labs went online and we had more time to work on personal projects and boost our Github contribution chart. This chance to show off personal projects and our growth over time should be available to everyone.

What it does

PortfolioHub is a social media platform that shows the version history of the projects that you have worked on in your spare team. It takes in anything from images to pdf's and detects the changes that have been made over time. These changes are counted as "contributions" and shown off to the rest of the world. With your account full of contributions, you can confidently show your network your projects and how your skills developed over time. Most importantly, it shows that you care enough about what you do to work on personal projects.

How we built it

We built it with a React.js front end for the user profile page, the project page and the routing in between. In order to detect changes between two pictures, we utilized an object detection model from the Python scikit library and OpenCV to highlight these differences. Google Cloud Platform's block storage platform was perfect to store the images and PDF's related to a user's project in order to allow flexibility as to what the user can upload. Finally, the backend consisted of the Python script that ran the difference detection model, uploaded images to the cloud, and a Flask server to retrieve results from it.

Challenges we ran into

There were quite a few challenges along the way from UI bugs, to deprecated Python packages, issues with virtual environments, and accessing files from Google Cloud Platform.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are pretty proud of being able to do all of this ourselves within 24 hrs.

What we learned

To be faster and get to the Red Bull first.

What's next for PortfolioHub

Next on the list is to make an upload feature and implement the contributions graph, similar to the ones you see in GitHub.

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